STRING THEORY

Next month Def Leppard release Drastic Symphonies, reworked classic Leps tracks accompanied by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. They invited us to Abbey Road Studios to watch it take shape.

- Words: Paul Elliott Photos: Kevin Nixon

It doesn’t happen very often with Joe Elliott, but for a brief moment, Def Leppard’s singer is lost for words. He and the other four members of the band – guitarists Phil Collen and Vivian Campbell, drummer Rick Allen and bassist Rick ‘Sav’ Savage – are standing on hallowed ground, inside Studio 1 at Abbey Road, where The Beatles created some of their greatest music. But this is not a regular recording session for Def Leppard. They are here not to play, but to observe. They are positioned on a balcony high above the studio floor. Below, arranged in neat rows, are the musicians of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. And as the orchestra plays the melody to one of Leppard’s biggest hit songs, Love Bites, Joe Elliott mouths a silent ‘wow’.

It is a winter day in early 2022, and Def Leppard have invited Classic Rock to Abbey Road to witness the creation of what Joe describes as “the most unusual record we’ve ever made”. Its title is Drastic Symphonies, and as Sav says with a smile: “It is pretty drastic. It’s very symphonic. And we couldn’t really call it Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, could we?”

Other rock bands have done this kind of thing before, most famously Deep Purple – who enlisted the Royal Philharmonic in 1969 for the Concerto For Group And Orchestra, for which the urbane keyboard-playing maestro Jon Lord composed an original score, performed and recorded live at the Albert Hall – and Metallica, who made two live albums with the San Francisco Symphony orchestra, S&M and S&M2 (the titles were an abbreviation of Symphony And Metallica).